


In the Wind's Singing

by queerly_it_is



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, High Chaos meets Low Chaos, M/M, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-24
Updated: 2017-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-26 13:33:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9899432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queerly_it_is/pseuds/queerly_it_is
Summary: There’s no reason given for it, and Corvo doesn’t honestly expect one. He doesn’t ponder much on the why of things anymore, or tries not to. Corvo sleeps better when he doesn’t go rooting around in the dark for threads to pull on.That doesn’t stop him asking.Doesn’t stop his other self from sneering, either.“It’s almost precious,” the walking mirror, the him-that-isn’t-him drawls, familiar mouth hammered into an unfamiliar shape. He’s not much thinner, but there’s a starved look to him that leaves Corvo wanting to put a few more steps between them than there are. “You still think there’s a reason for any of it. That the reason matters.” The mouth curls sharper, flash of teeth, too bright. Like a rat’s. “Well it doesn’t.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> So I saw [this art](http://mustachossom.tumblr.com/post/79056563479/highlowchaosship-hahahaha-low-chaos-corvos-like) of high chaos and low chaos Corvo and things kind of spiralled from there. All remaining blame goes to Helen.

There’s no reason given for it, and Corvo doesn’t honestly expect one. He doesn’t ponder much on the _why_ of things anymore, or tries not to. Corvo sleeps better when he doesn’t go rooting around in the dark for threads to pull on.

That doesn’t stop him asking.

Doesn’t stop his other self from sneering, either.

“It’s almost precious,” the walking mirror, the him-that-isn’t-him drawls, familiar mouth hammered into an unfamiliar shape. He’s not much thinner, but there’s a starved look to him that leaves Corvo wanting to put a few more steps between them than there are. “You still think there’s a reason for any of it. That the reason matters.” The mouth curls sharper, flash of teeth, too bright. Like a rat’s. “Well it doesn’t.”

It’s not quite hate, what Corvo sees looking back at him, when he can focus past the skin-crawling _wrong_ of the whole picture. It’s more like scorn. Contempt. As if other-him has some essential truth tucked away behind his back and he’s enjoying the chance to dole it out slowly.

This is the more unsettling thing. The insight. The just-around-the-corner way Corvo can almost _feel_ himself wearing that edged, brittle look, feel the sharp and over-wary twitches in the shoulders and hands his alternate makes whenever Corvo shifts even slightly.

There’s no furniture left in this little apartment, just the dismantled Outsider’s shrine that was tucked into the corner and the lantern Corvo set down on the floor to make up for the boarded-over window. Everything else was carted off to be burned or sold as the city remakes itself, an ugly birth, with too much blood. There’s nothing here to throw or put between them.

Even in an empty district Corvo doesn’t think there’s enough space for the stare that’s boring into him.

Predatory, is the overall impression. _Killer_ , is the word that comes to mind, in all the worst and unjust shades of it.

Mirrors reflecting mirrors. Just the cracks are in different places. And the more he looks, the more Corvo could swear his alternate’s shadow isn’t as flat as it should be. Or as still. It’s seething in the glow of the lantern, boiling in the gloom outside the circle of light.

He abruptly decides if there is a reason, he doesn’t want it, that he’s better off staying free of any understandings. That whatever door the thread leads under, it’s meant to stay shut.

Other-Corvo tilts his head, the deep darkness under his eyes seeming to move in a wholly different way, and smirks. Knowing.

“Too late,” he says, in answer to what Corvo isn’t saying, because of course he doesn’t need to, does he? “No, you don’t want to hear it. But maybe you should. It’s only fair. What’s mine is yours, after all.”

“Not interested,” Corvo says, his voice glaring in how different it is, lighter, less rusted-over. It _hurts_ when this other-him speaks, an echo somewhere beneath hearing, a sharp scratching that lives just behind the air. “Unless it involves you going back wherever you came from.”

“It could,” other-Corvo shrugs, nothing real in the casual way he leans into the wall behind him. “Then again we’ve never had much of a say, have we?”

Corvo moves a hand, just the faintest hint of intention. The empty pit-eyes dart to it, to the sword in his belt, flick up to his throat and then back to his face, so quick it might never have happened.

It’s distinctly unpleasant, having his other self’s attention. Like being slowly flayed. There’s tightness creeping into Corvo’s muscles where he’s holding ever-so-carefully still now. He was just neatly murdered in the span of that look.

Corvo doesn’t know when he last had the impression that if he did draw his blade, he’d lose.

The silence is mortal now.

“The Outsider brought you here,” he says then, not wanting to, wanting no part of whatever joke is being played with him – _them_ – this time. But silence gives other-Corvo nothing to do but look, peeling him layer by layer, with too little effort, forcing him back into places where he truly doesn’t want the company.

As a distraction it seems to work. Other-Corvo’s jaw clenches, and a few reflexive tics work their way between his fingers. “Obvious answer,” he bites out, thin and cut-throat sharp. “But our old benefactor doesn’t have much time for me these days.” An awful smile, thrown down between them alongside the knowledge of Corvo’s corpse feeding its lifeblood between the dirty floorboards. “Seems I’m something of a disappointment. I stopped playing along. Not you though, I take it.”

“Where _did_ you come from?” he asks, moving finally, trusting the stiffness building in his limbs even less than his alternate’s reaction, moving more toward the middle of the room. “Or is it _when_?”

“Don’t worry,” other-Corvo sneers, bitter. “I’m not the future you have to look forward to. Not unless there’s a lot more backbone in you than I can see from here. No. We stop and start in the same place, headed down the same street. You just walked softer. Kept your hands nice and clean.”

“So what do you want?” Corvo asks, changing the direction of his slow pacing again, watching other-him shift his weight against the wall. Moves and countermoves. “To take my place?”

It gets him an off-balance kind of glance, a noiseless huff of a laugh. “You think I _chose_ to come here? That you have anything I might want?”

“I have Emily.”

On-target, that, aimed almost too perfectly. There’s real feeling clawing lines into other-Corvo’s face now, his colour turned sallow, expression raw down to the bones. It turns Corvo’s stomach to see it.

 _This is what I must’ve looked like_ , he thinks, still pacing, slower now, _as they were dragging Emily away_.

_That’s the face I was wearing when they put the sword in Jessamine._

_He never took it off._

“What happened?” Corvo asks, fighting for control of his voice, throttles it trying to keep the rage and guilt and disgust out. Mirrors reflecting mirrors. He knows exactly where to push to make the cracks splinter outwards. “Did you get there too late, again? Were you too slow, again?”

Standing in the Void with shattered bits of the Tower floating all around. Blood on the stones, blood on his fingers where it’s soaking through the note in his hand: _YOU CANNOT SAVE HER YOU CANNOT SAVE HER—_

He risks a step closer. Other-Corvo’s chest is moving quicker now, rat-eyes aimed away for the first time, too-narrow hands fisted until his knuckles stand out in jagged white ridges like the jaws in a skull. Skinned bare. For the first time Corvo notices the wide, futile pink slash of a scar across his other self’s Outsider mark.

“Did you just watch it happen,” he asks lowly, floorboards creaking underfoot, hating the both of them, sick with it, “again?”

Not easy, facing yourself, all the howling, gutted parts of you. Harder still to look into those hollow places when you remember them as full. Almost unbearable.

Another step. “You didn’t save her,” he says, the cornerstone that’s never out of reach. He watches this fractured version of himself flinch, feels it in his own skin like an unshaken nightmare. Nearly close enough now, fingers going to his belt, slipping inside the pouch of darts. “You didn’t save either of them.”

Air hits him like a solid wall with the sound of a tearing sky. The floor crashes into his back, ears ringing, ceiling tilting wildly, the dart he’d had in his palm nowhere to be felt.

Hands wrap themselves up in his front, twist and _heave_ , and the world careens again with a seasick feeling. Corvo’s shoulders bruisingly meet with another surface – _Wall this time_ , he thinks, just as his skull gets rattled on the end of a punch that splits his lip wide, fills his mouth with the taste of greasy coins.

“There was nothing left to save,” his other spits, flecking Corvo’s cheek with it. This close, his eyes are worse. Not like the bottomless, endless pitch of the Outsider’s. Wild and scraped out with something blunt. A face like a grave dug with fingernails. “It was rotten, all of it, to the heart. Dunwall. The Empire.” Another shove, and Corvo loses what breath he’d gotten back, the back of his head cracking into the wall. “It’s all better off at the bottom of the sea.”

Nearly deaf with the blood roaring in his ears and thumping in his temples, his pulse a physical, animal thing thrashing in his throat, Corvo’s own voice comes from the back of a cave. “She was your daughter.”

Other-Corvo’s face presses in again, hair stringing down across cheeks and forehead, lips peeled back from shining bars of teeth. “A lot of good it did her.”

Corvo throws his weight forward, kicking out, hits a thigh, brings his knee up into his other’s stomach. The hands unravel from his clothes. The wall falls away from his back.

He swings hard as other-Corvo staggers up from his winded crouch, a solid hit to the face that breaks the skin high over one cheekbone. He catches the dim flash of metal from inside a boot, sidesteps the swipe of the small knife – a half-rusted fisherman’s tool, from the look of it – closes his fingers around his alternate’s cordlike wrist and _twists_ , enjoying the cracked yell of pain more than he should.

The knife clatters to the floor. Corvo kicks it away, absorbs the next brutal, barely-controlled lunge aimed for his ribs and carries them both into another wall, the dark fireplace looming like a put-out eye.

They hit with a crash that jars Corvo’s teeth, shakes the lamp on its loose floorboard and sends their combined shadow twitching to one side, a jerking, gangling monster of angles contorting on itself.

“Enough,” he hisses through a shocky exhale, barely avoiding a punch to the kidneys, arms full of his struggling non-self. He takes more bruises on his sides, thinking of the sleep darts in the belt pouch, trying to spot the one he’d dropped, trying to get enough free movement for a chokehold. “ _Enough_. It’s done.”

“ _It’s never done_ ,” he hears, snarled beside his ear, animal-desperate, with more frantic kicking aimed for his knee. “We’re alive, so it’s not done. It’s a game. It’s all a game and it _never stops_.”

Light from the Outsider’s mark flares up somewhere between them, with sudden _pressure_ in Corvo’s head and under his skin everywhere, searing in his veins like poison. He loses grip on the arm and shoulder he was holding down, feels his legs giving way. There’s another tip-tilt of all sense of balance, and when his throbbing eyes refocus he’s looking at the ceiling, stained and peeling, bowing downwards.

Breath comes to his lungs with fire and the jagged heaving of his chest, heart about to burst, coloured specks crowding his vision. Corvo looks blearily around the room, finds other-him in a similar state, sprawled on his back with fingers digging sharply into the floor, his back arched as if there’s a charge going through him.

“Doesn’t work then, that trick,” he manages to say, throat hurting, still not enough air in him. He lets out something like a laugh, if a laugh was three days dead. “Can’t borrow my skin if you’re already wearing it.”

“Not you,” other-Corvo says, voice creaking like a raven’s, veins livid in his neck, every muscle showing in his jaw. He turns onto his side, still twitching, curling like a man used to being kicked. “I’m _not_ like you. You’re weak.”

Another strangled laugh. He sits up, head swimming, leaning on a hand. “ _I’m_ weak? This from you?”

“Half measures,” other-Corvo spits, rolling and pushing onto his knees, leaning back on his haunches to stare. The lamp that’s sat between them throws gaunt black shapes behind him, the blood on his cheek slick as oil. “You’re a puppet. A tool. You’re the Outsider’s toy.”

“Derelict,” Corvo counters. “Failure.” He wipes at his own trickle of blood that’s down to his chin. “Traitor.”

His alternate’s teeth flash in a nasty smile. “Good to meet you.” His hand comes up, opens to show the missing sleep dart, cracked and empty now. He makes a show of the disappointed look he aims Corvo’s way before he tosses the dart into the empty fireplace. “You should have taken the knife.”

“I’ve got no use for it.”

Other-Corvo chuffs. “That’s too bad. It was Samuel’s.”

Cold cuts through the prickling and burning in his blood, down his spine. “That your doing too?”

“He tried to stop me.” The smile digs in, more cruelly than the knife would have. “He always was a better man than us.”

“Still is, from my perspective,” Corvo says, getting another sharp look but no reply.

He doesn’t know how long they sit like that, just looking, at the edge of the light – both wounded, two razors, a pair of wishes for a little less self-knowledge.

“Don’t suppose you know why he’d bother sending me here?” other-Corvo asks finally, jerking his chin vaguely upwards. “What the game is this time?”

“I’m as informed as you,” Corvo says, dry, with full irony.

Other-Corvo shakes his head again, huffs. “Not enough people carving him love notes in their neighbour’s bones, maybe. You got your city all stitched up again; mine went beneath the waves. No more plague. Bastard must be bored.” He lifts a shoulder, smirking. “So you won’t kill me, and you can’t explain me – might frighten the masses out there, not to mention the Abbey.” He tilts his head, looking Corvo over, narrow-eyed. “If they take our heads, do you think they’ll be able to tell us apart? Or maybe we could share a pyre.”

“You planning on staying?” Corvo asks, brows raising. “Had enough of that ruin you made for yourself, then?”

The smirk spreads. “Going to introduce me to little Emily? Let me make my obeisance to the throne? I promise I still remember how.”

Corvo can’t help his fingers curling tight on top of his thighs, kneeling back. “She wouldn’t know you.”

“She did,” other-him says. “She knew me. Who ever saw us the way she could? Not mother, who we ran away from. Not Bea, who fell off the map rather than stay near us. Not even Jessamine, who wanted her protector to be gentle and perfect, and didn’t understand even when they gutted her. They all died clueless. None of them wanted the truth, not the steel, the sword we traded them for.”

“Shut up.”

“But Emily saw it all. All the good, and the parts that had nothing to do with good. All the dark, stained corners, full of rats. We love her for that, more than anything. We hate her so much. The waves were kind when they hid her from me.”

“ _I said shut up._ ”

He’s on his feet, doesn’t remember getting there, other-him sat perfectly still with his knees on the floorboards, posture easy except for the taut shoulders, the tremor in his hands, looking harmless if you ignore the basic fact of him.

“There’s our black-eyed friend, of course,” other-Corvo carries on. “He sees everything, doesn’t he? But it doesn’t matter. To him, it’s all the same. He sees, but he doesn’t care, just looks longer at what plays his games. No wonder we clung to him, grasping for gifts, offering a hand to be branded. He’s as hollow as we are.”

Red behind his eyes. The taste of metal. The empty apartment echoing with Corvo’s breathing, booming with his steps as he crosses the floor and hauls his other up to meet him.

“ _We’re not the same_ ,” he says. It would be a scream, it _wants_ to be, but there’s not enough sound in him for that, just a consuming, hateful hush. A river, blank-surfaced and full of corpses, offering no excuses for itself. “You said, remember? You’re _not_ me.”

Other-Corvo just hangs in his grip this time, looking down at him through lank hair and with too much keenness. “I am. We are. We can’t help it.” His hand comes up slowly, slowly, until his thumb’s running down Corvo’s jaw to his chin, where they both know there’s blood. Touches his lip, where it stings, without apology. “There’s not enough left for two of us, is there? There’s barely even one of us. So you can keep the mercy. I get the truth.”

Corvo’s shaking, heart rattling around inside him, his skin stretched over too much violence with no outlet. “No.”

The thumb brushes his lip again, pulling at the cut, fresh blood welling up. “It doesn’t have to hurt.” Another hand, this time on his chest, sliding up near his neck. “It doesn’t have to feel like anything at all.”

He’s too close, Corvo can feel his breath, the room blotted out behind him as he leans in, bringing a tide of shadow with him, until it’s all greyness blurred into non-meaning. His voice burrows, makes a home in Corvo’s marrow. Everything smells of cold and iron.

The fingers find his throat, too light, toying with him.

“It’s a lot like dying, isn’t it?” he hears, and doesn’t know from where. Doesn’t know that it matters.

The kiss hurts. There’s blood in it, smeared with rough stubble and lips pressing hard with teeth not far behind. It’s a shard of glass wrapped in cloth, careful until it isn’t, until you realise it was never careful to begin with. Until you try and use it.

It keeps going, deeper and less careful. It’s too much, and it’s empty, the way pain is always empty. You can’t fill anything with hurt, can’t build on it. Stack a shadow on a shadow and it won’t ever come to anything.

But he sways into it, into a wash of marks bitten against his lips, the tongue bullying its way inside him. He trades the taste of blood for older blood with no real difference. They breathe the same, move the same; they want the same, just as pointlessly.

They clutch rougher and meaner to each other until it’s the same as the fighting, because at least that makes it simpler. He won’t be able to tell the bruises apart, no line to draw between the violence and the search for something violence hasn’t infected. Except the one his other-self diverts to suck into the skin beneath his jaw, quick and hard, edged with teeth set in a granite smile.

Their feet slot together, running nowhere, two vacant rooms with a single floor. Their chests knock each other’s breath loose, crashing loud between their bodies, the only warm thing in a cold swell of lamplight, both of them reaching after a fire that won’t last.

Corvo’s hands find scarred, burning skin under coarse cloth, tight muscle and the jut of hipbones. His scraping nails earn him a choppy sound that burrs right up against the vein in his throat.

He hasn’t—there’s been no one. Not since Jessamine. How could there have been?

When he pulls back, Corvo sees that thought too, written in flickers on his other’s face, bouncing off the eyes, skin as thin as pages showing what’s underneath. He knows it won’t stop them, they both know. There’s no border that starvation stops at. Never any softness from a mirror. You accept, or look away, or try to break the mirror.

Clothes get pulled and dragged aside, and the light carves them both like ivory, slats of ribs and collarbones, shoulders that might be wings, folded into breaking. The floor presses up into Corvo’s back, scrapes him when he arches. His other’s breath rushes out when Corvo touches him, hands moving with no learning needed, like picking up a sword for the first or thousandth time. The same tight, twisting grip on him dissolves his spine, gives somewhere for the heat in him to run to.

They know too much for it to be gentle, dragging each other closer and closer through wet gasps and gritted teeth, forgetting everything except _here_ and _here_ and _harder._ Trying to set the clocks back even by an hour, or come close enough to surrender for it to matter. The word _please_ is nowhere. They leave the names out of it. His other’s heart clatters against Corvo’s palm, a cage of narrow ribs with a spindly little sparrow, flinging itself to death.

He hits the edge and crashes over, splayed out and battered like a ship against the jagged points of it, spilling over and over between them with his head thudding back. And then again, the same from his other body, with no light between them, nothing to cleave them. It grinds them together, both shuddering, both shivering and wrecked, with neither of them mended but somehow managing, without admitting it, to want the mending anyway.

Corvo tries to turn his face away, tries to get up, and other-Corvo won’t let him have either, kisses him again instead, his weight pinning Corvo down and his hands framing Corvo’s face, thumbs wiping beneath his eyes, cold where the air hits wet skin. Danger curls at the base of his skull, with that touch so close to his eyes. But other-Corvo curls into him, up against him, closer to the warmth and the mess they are.

He crushes his swollen lips in the kiss, feels the raging of the sparrow against his breastbone, digging in a wound for a bit of light. All of it hurts. None of it is really new. Now he’s just tired, eyes trying to close, body fighting to be nothing for a while.

“You should see it,” other-Corvo says a meaningless time later, like a stray thought in the drowning quiet, his fingers running up and down Corvo’s skin. Underneath the skin, his voice itches. “The empty world. No more crowns. Nothing to need. Only the endless sea and a reef of bones.” He kisses a bloody scratch he’s left high on Corvo’s chest, leans over him until their eyes meet, almost gentle, tender, something you have to be trodden into. “Is all this really so much better?”

Corvo lifts a hand, holding on to his other’s chin, thumb pressing on his mouth.

“It isn’t ours,” he says, simple, no other shape left but admission. “It never was. It’s hers.”

Teeth catch his thumb, hard. Fingers climb near his neck again. “Not for me.”

“Yes it is,” Corvo says, catching the strangling hand in his. “You let the sea have her. And you pushed the world into the sea after her. It’s what I would have done.”

There’s that truth at least. They’ll always have what they lost. The same name hanging around their necks. The name of the sparrow. If there’s no saving to be had, they might as well at least try for forgiveness. It’s a kind of answer, even if it’s brimming over with saltwater.

The hand goes slack. Just a fingertip tracing symbols in the hollow of his throat. Corvo thinks he might even know what they are.

 _Aren’t you tired of the mask?_ he means to say, can’t quite manage it under the fathoms of air, light draping them in tatters. _Isn’t it too heavy?_

_Do your dreams hurt as much as mine?_

He shuts his eyes again—

—opens them on a familiar not-place, looking up into no sky at all with wind rolling over him, whispering with the voice of dry leaves, telling him things he can’t quite hear but that sound like promises.

“Hello, Corvo.”

Black eyes, with all of everything behind them. That smell of iron again, and moon dust.

He’s lying on a broken slab of stone, a few uneven floorboards hovering around it like broken teeth, his clothes put back the way they were, no sign of his other self anywhere.

“You did well with him,” the Outsider says, making Corvo wince, as if his skull is fogged glass with all his thoughts written on the inside. “With you, I mean. When I found him, he was sleeping off another day of drink in the hold of a dreadful ship. A murderer in the company of murderers. There’s nothing of interest in that, for either of us.”

Corvo stands, reluctantly, trying to keep his eyes away from the harsh glow off in the distance, not quite light, more like dark facing the other way. “You couldn’t have just let him go?”

The Outsider gives a faint shrug. “Perhaps. But tell me, Corvo, where could he have gone? What dark, quiet place could ever be far enough that he wouldn’t find himself waiting there? Better that he meet you instead, I think. Better for you both to see.”

“To see what?”

He knows. He wishes he didn’t. And the Outsider doesn’t bother telling him.

“This was supposed to help him?” There’s a twinge when he says it. His lip is still split. “He’s got nothing left.”

“It was meant to provide you both some... perspective,” the Outsider says. There’s a great tower behind him, windowless and pale as bone, stretching up into forever. “And now he has you, like you have him. You each keep something of the other. What you do with it is your choice.”

“Right. Some choice,” Corvo says.

The Outsider holds out his hands, moves them like a scale. “Living is a choice. The first choice and the hardest. You have to make it again, every day, until you reach your second choice.”

Corvo doesn’t need to say it. “What to live for,” he says anyway. “It’s not always enough.”

The Outsider is closer on Corvo’s next blink, or Corvo is, or the space is smaller. Everything is smoke, suspended on haunting song in unreliable, shifting depth.

“Nothing is always, Corvo. Not even me. But we keep making choices, don’t we? While we can.”

“Why?” he asks, that fool’s question, especially here, in this between where reason never was. The tower is gone now, replaced by a gnarled black tree with branches pushing the stars apart, roots that disappear down into time. Corvo thinks he can hear it dreaming.

“To reach the next choice,” the Outsider says. “To see how far we’ll go. It’s the only thing worth learning. It’s the only thing you can’t learn in this place. Keep making choices, Corvo. I don’t imagine we’ll speak again until... well. Until.”

He waves a hand, inverted light catching rings, and shivers apart into night and music. The impossible distance all around groans, starts shredding itself at the seams until it gives way to splinters, then plain walls, with a stained ceiling hanging above grubby floorboards, lit by a milky sphere of lamplight.

Corvo looks around, only once, tongue catching a trace of blood, considering choices. He’s as alone as he was when there were two of him, as you ever are with a mirror.

Before he steps out through the door, leaving it open behind him, he breaks the boards off the window.

He leaves the lamp where it is, so it’s brighter than before, depending where you choose to stand. For as long as the light lasts. Or until it’s day.

**Author's Note:**

> You can also find me [here](http://queerly-it-is.tumblr.com/) on tumblr


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